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There's a Black Sheep In Every Family Fold

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WHEN families gather around the holiday table for the traditional feast, there is traditionally one person who is conspicuous by either absence or presence.

Male or female, rich or poor, married or single, young or old, teetotaler or alcoholic - this person is often the object of ridicule, pity, envy, awe, fear, scorn, embarrassment or secret admiration, for as the proverb goes: ''There is a black sheep in every fold.'' Yet, the black sheep is an important if often unwelcome guest.

''The subtext of Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays is the celebration of the family,'' said Elizabeth Stone, who wrote ''Black Sheep/Kissing Cousins (How Our Family Stories Shape Us)'' (Times Books, 1988). ''The inclusion of the black sheep testifies to the family's dominant value, which is family unity.''

Ms. Stone said that ''the black sheep needs to be there for the holidays to remind the rest of the family of how wonderful they are.''

Anyone can be the black sheep for just about any reason. ''In families there are one or two opinion leaders who define the values and culture of the family,'' said Dr. Jerry Jellison, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California. Those values can be moral or ethical; they can rest on success in business or involvement in sports or the arts. The black sheep is simply the person who deviates from the family rules.

''My mother at one time had trouble with the fact that I was a psychiatrist,'' said Dr. J. Ted Vidmar, a child psychiatrist in Pasadena, Calif. ''It's easy to say 'my son, the surgeon' or 'my son, the internist.' But 'my son, the psychiatrist' was embarrassing. Where we come from in Colorado, psychiatry is not quite understood.''

Dr. Thomas Lasswell, professor of clinical behavior at the James A. Peterson Center for Human Relations at the University of Southern California, said most black sheep were self-defined. ''People tell me that they're the black sheep, rather than having someone in the family tell them,'' he said. ''It's usually a mutually agreed-on direction, but the black sheep accepts it with a smile on his face.''

Still, Dr. Lasswell said, most people who call themselves black sheep have actually distanced themselves from their families. ''While they may long to go home for the holidays and enjoy the fatted calf that's been fixed for their return,'' he said, ''they have to realize that the same forces that made them leave in the first place will probably still persist.''

One self-defined black sheep, Hunter Marquez, said: ''I'm from New Orleans, where no one ever leaves. My family has been there for generations and generations, and they don't trust anyone who's been gone for more than 10 minutes. In the South all you have to do is cross the state line and you become the black sheep.''

Mr. Marquez, an artist living in Los Angeles, continued: ''My mother and father are straight arrows. They have no idea what I do. I go back and they ask 'What are you doing? You still looking for work?' If I say I sold a painting, they roll their eyes and say: 'Uh-huh. Pass the eggplant and the crawfish.' ''

As for going home for Christmas, this black sheep bleats ''baa humbug.''

''Never the holidays,'' Mr. Marquez said. The extra pressure of a large family gathering would simply be too much. ''How do you deal with a room full of relatives who are still talking about losing the Civil War?''

Michael Dare, an underground artist-critic-musician in Los Angeles, proclaimed: ''I was the black sheep growing up. And I'm still the guy standing in the corner muttering, 'Who are all those people?' All we have in common is the name.''

Mr. Dare said with a sigh: ''I truly wish I could think of Thanksgiving as a holiday of pleasure, but I think of it as a holiday of torment. I would give thanks if I could stay home.''

So why does this black sheep return to the fold? Mr. Dare said simply: ''My mother calls me up and wails that, 'Your family does so much for you. You never do anything for your family.' ''

That's not quite true. ''The black sheep is the family's safety valve, its outlet,'' Ms. Stone said. ''They get a lot of mileage out of the black sheep,'' as against the family skeleton. The skeleton, Ms. Stone said, is ''tucked away and you don't talk about it.'' The black sheep, however, ''needs to circulate, needs to be seen, and most of all needs to be discussed.''

In some families, the black sheep is used as a scapegoat, an object lesson to keep the other sheep in line. ''I was the one who pioneered things in the family, like smoking pot and growing my hair long, so I became the black sheep,'' said Ken Simons, a pension consultant living in Santa Barbara, Calif. ''My brother is eight years younger than me and my parents kept warning him that if he didn't toe the family line he might turn out like his big bad brother.''

Mr. Simons continued: ''When I finally moved out of the house, my parents sent my little brother to my apartment with a bankbook from a savings account that they had started for me when I was born. All the money had been withdrawn. My little brother handed me an itemized list of every penny that my parents had spent on toys, clothes, health insurance and college tuition. It really destroyed our relationship.''

By contrast, some families live vicariously through their black sheep. For example, Oscar Fruchtman's family was quite supportive when, as he recounted, God told him one night to give up his job as an English teacher in East Harlem and move to Venice, Calif., a scruffy beach-front community and prime black sheep pasture land.

''Everybody expects me to do things like that,'' said Mr. Fruchtman, a Princeton University graduate and former president of United Synagogue Youth who hopes to ''connect with comedy writing or music.''

He explained: ''I have 25 cousins and a lot of them are doctors. My being a rebel is a novelty. They like the fact that I have interesting stories to tell at the family parties.'' Like Mr. Fruchtman, many black sheep revel in their inky fleeces. ''It gives me a certain amount of freedom,'' said Stephen Marks, a Baltimore resident who uses his blacksheepishness to maintain his independence while working in the family business. ''Everybody knows better than to push me too far.''

He insists that being what the rest of his fold calls the ''family eccentric'' does not necessarily imply disapproval. ''I'm more like the wild card in the deck,'' he said.

Dr. Carlfred Broderick, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, said: ''Let's face it, without a black sheep there's no drama in the family soap. You need the black sheep for a little spice, a little garlic. If it weren't for sorrowing over how your uncle always shows up drunk on Thanksgiving and spoils things, you'd have to watch the football games.''

Of course, each family has a different attitude toward its most errant member. ''Ours aren't considered black sheep as much as they're considered drastically weird,'' said Robin Cork, an off-white sheep now living in San Francisco. ''The attitude is more, 'Oh, that's just the way they are.' ''

Fortunately, her family is easily amused. Ms. Cork remembers visiting her family in Texas one Christmas and asking her grandmother why one cousin, a dentist usually a holiday regular, was absent.

Ms. Cork recalled that: ''Grandmother kind of shrugged and said, 'Oh, it was that thing with the race horse.' It turned out that my cousin had doped a race horse. My family agreed it was unfortunate that he got caught.''

Because he brought shame to the family? ''No,'' Ms. Cork said. ''Because they all lost their dentist.''

A version of this article appears in print on November 23, 1988, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: There's a Black Sheep In Every Family Fold. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe